Trial told of Iran links to al-Qaeda

Iran's secret service had contacts with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network before the September 11 attacks on the United States, a German court has been told.

Two members of Germany's Federal Criminal Police told a court in Hamburg on Thursday that a former Iranian spy had informed them of the contacts. He had also said he tried to warn Washington about the attacks in mid-2001, but the CIA had not believed him.

The police officers were speaking at the trial of a Moroccan accused of aiding the September 11 attacks.

The Iranian, identified only by his cover name Hamid Reza Zakeri, emerged as a surprise witness. His credibility is under scrutiny by the presiding judges.

Presiding judge Klaus Ruehle read out passages from an interview with the Iranian and questioned the two German investigators who had listened to his testimony.

The Iranian said he had been in a department of the Iranian intelligence service that was "responsible for carrying out terrorist attacks globally", one officer said. "In 2001, a delegation with Osama bin Laden's son was in Iran," the officer said, quoting the witness.

The Iranian witness has been summoned to appear on January 29 at the trial of Moroccan Abdelghani Mzoudi, accused of aiding the September 11 attackers. Mzoudi, 31, was expected to be cleared of several thousand charges of aiding and abetting murder and membership of a terror organisation in a verdict due on Thursday, but postponed after the emergence of the Iranian witness.

The police officers told the court the witness had implicated Mzoudi and had said the Iranian secret service had worked with al-Qaeda in 1996 in an attack in Saudi Arabia that killed several US citizens. He had also said an Iranian, Saif al Adel, the military head of al-Qaeda, planned the September 11 attacks.

Prosecutors say Mzoudi, an electrical engineering student based in Hamburg where three of the suicide pilots had lived, handled money for al-Qaeda, helped cover for group members' absence and trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

However, he was released from custody after German investigators told the court of secret testimony that the trial judge presumed to have come from al-Qaeda figure and US captive Ramzi bin al-Shaibah. That testimony suggested Mzoudi did not belong to the core group of plotters based in Hamburg.

Prosecutors, who seek a 15-year jail term, did not say how they had found their new witness only three days before the verdict was due.